LESLIE RICHARDSON: Welcome back.
I'd like to welcome
Microsoft Director of Growth
Innovation and Strategy,
Nick McQuire.
Thanks for joining us. All the way from the UK.
NICK MCQUIRE: Hello, Lesley.
Yes. Here at UK HQ,
pleasure to be here.
It's late, but the team's here and it's great.
LESLIE RICHARDSON: Great.
Thanks for waiting for us.
Satya mentioned in his keynote on day one that
Azure is everywhere. What do we mean by that?
NICK MCQUIRE: Yeah. Well,
the Cloud is expanding into
this ubiquitous and highly distributed fabric
that's bringing compute closer to the edge,
but it's ultimately bringing compute
closer to the problems that
developers are trying to solve.
What he means is that Azure has become
this comprehensive and flexible platform
to build these distributed apps that can
span not only from the Cloud to the 5G edge,
but increasingly over time, even space as well,
which is just wild.
LESLIE RICHARDSON: Yeah, it is.
I think other people
see that too.
On Twitter, I saw one was
just like Azure Azure, Azure, Azure.
It really is everywhere.
But what does this mean for developers?
NICK MCQUIRE: Well, what it means
is actually we're seeing
a new category of application emerge.
What we're calling modern connected apps.
Modern connected apps are
these highly network intelligent applications
that have the ability to
interrogate the network and have the ability to
ultimately help developers solve
problems that they'd previously not been able to solve.
I think that's what's really important when we
think about this category of
application and what's coming with
respect to this type of application area.
LESLIE RICHARDSON: Great. Now, I also remember
back in Satya's keynote that there was
a little teaser of a customer
Ferrovial doing some work that relates to this.
Can you tell us a little bit more
about what Ferrovial is up to?
NICK MCQUIRE: Yeah, sure.
Why don't I show you
a demo of the Ferrovial solution?
I think that would be fantastic.
Should we do a demo?
LESLIE RICHARDSON: Yeah.
Who doesn't like a good demo?
NICK MCQUIRE: Highways are becoming
more and more
digitized to improve safety.
Ferrovial is creating a smart road solution'
called AIVIA,
where the road is basically exposed as an API enabling
infrastructure to automatically adjust in
real time to changing situations,
thanks to information from cameras and
sensors that are placed along the highway.
This allows Ferrovial to create
a digital twin of the highway in real time,
which is what you're seeing here.
Now, the cool thing is, is they can offer
services to the drivers and expose
information as APIs to
connected vehicles or autonomous cars.
For example, they built a custom AI model
for object recognition
to identify safety hazards like
debris or broken down vehicles.
Latency is so critical,
a few milliseconds can make
the difference in terms of saving lives.
The solution has to be ultra reliable and responsive,
which is why it's based on 5G.
Using 5G enabled cameras,
sensors, and panels,
roads can automatically identify
these hazards and respond in real time,
such as submitting service requests
or updating the signage to inform the drivers.
Now, how do you bring 5G
and compute to the highway for all of this?
Well, in areas further away from the cities,
Ferrovial deploys their own private
5G network along the highway,
using Azure Private MEC to
bring compute to those locations.
But in other cases, such as
updating the digital message signs,
they can use an available public 5G network
if in an area with 5G coverage.
In those cases, Azure is
partnering with carriers through Azure for
Operators Initiative so they can provide
compute locally to those networks too,
what's called Azure Public MEC.
You have Azure Private MEC to extend Azure Compute to
your own private 5G networks and
Azure Public MEC if you want to
use an available 5G network.
LESLIE RICHARDSON: Shoot, that is really cool.
But as magical as it seems from that demo,
what's actually going on behind the scenes?
NICK MCQUIRE: Yeah, so why don't I
show you some of the components in Azure portal?
I think that'll answer your question for you.
Why don't we roll the next next flavor of the demo?
LESLIE RICHARDSON: Yes.
NICK MCQUIRE: If I start with a private
5G network,
with Azure Private MEC,
you can manage several aspects of the network
directly from the Azure portal or even programmatically.
For example, we can get a holistic view of
all the various locations where
the private 5G network is active,
and if we do a double click,
we can see them represented as an edge custom location.
Because the solution is deployed as
a Kubernetes cluster using Azure ARC,
you can manage this type of
distributed containerized application in
a highly consistent way across on
premises and multi-loud environments.
Now still in the Azure portal,
you can also view and configure
all the different devices connected to
the private 5G network and set up
policies such as quality of
service to determine how the network will
handle things like traffic prioritization
and bandwidth usage.
Now, this is just on the private 5G side,
but here we can see the same
distributed app deployed through
several Kubernetes clusters across
multiple targets to cover different requirements.
Besides the Arc connected cluster we
saw previously for the MEC,
we also have our application deployed in
regular Azure regions and
also in an available Public MEC node.
The highway here is in Dallas,
so we can use the Azure Public MEC node provided by
our partner AT&T and you can
see how it is completely integrated with Azure.
This cluster will run in
AT&T's local compute in their network in Dallas,
which is where my highway is connected to.
That means very low latency for me to target
the critical scenarios such as
hazard identification we saw earlier.
Now, in this cluster, we are running
the video analytics model to detect traffic congestion.
What's powering it, is a video platform called
Edge Video Services or EVS,
along with ML models from
Azure Cognitive Services such as Spatial Analysis.
This provides intelligent video analysis
for this vehicle counting
application that we saw earlier.
Now EVS splits across
private and Public MEC or regular Azure regions,
and it's optimized to work with 5G to reduce
network traffic, volume, and make
the best use of the compute infrastructure underneath.
Now, say, we wanted to set up
a new Smart Road deployment in Atlanta, for example.
Well, we could just deploy our AKS cluster into
an available AT&T Public MEC node in that location,
which is exposed in the Azure portal as edge zones,
as you can see here.
Of course, we can just use
GitHub actions to automate the CIC pipeline,
which allows us to automatically deploy
the same containerized code base across MEC,
Public MEC, and Azure regions
in parallel with each code change.
This is such
a great example of
a modern connected app powered by 5G in action,
bringing compute closer to
the problem that needs to be solved.
For Ferrovial case, it literally was
solving safety problems at the roadside.
Because we got one unified and flexible platform,
we have the ability to manage it
all through one single pane of glass,
which is just phenomenal.
LESLIE RICHARDSON: That is fantastic
and very important work,
clearly.
Where can developers get started?
NICK MCQUIRE: Please go visit us at
aka.ms/modernconnectedapps.
You can see it on the screen here
and we'd love to hear from you.
LESLIE RICHARDSON: Awesome.
Well, Nick, thank you so much
for joining us.
NICK MCQUIRE: Thank you for having me.